


Project Leto

by swu



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Gen, Werewolves, warnings don't really apply until later chapters (will mention in author's note)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:59:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swu/pseuds/swu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about werewolves, but not werewolves bitten and created through chance of nature (or the supernatural). This is a story about girls who were made <a href="http://maggiechens.tumblr.com/post/98400093323">wolves by design</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It might be helpful to read [the premise of this AU](http://maggiechens.tumblr.com/post/98400093323) if you haven't already.

> _we would gladly get our fill  / howling endlessly and shrilly at the dawn  
>  and i lost the taste for judging right from wrong_  

Sarah Manning wakes up in an unfamiliar forest, still dark. She stands and stretches languorously, breathing in the trees around her. She’s naked, but it doesn’t trouble her—she knows no one is watching. There isn’t a soul around, not for miles.

She digs her toes into the soil, feels the warmth of the loamy earth against her skin and the pulse of this new forest beneath her. It throbs through the soles of her feet, warmth (life, power) rippling upwards through her body.

Her back curls as the heat climbs up her spine, and she falls forward softly. By the time her hands touch the forest floor, they’re no longer hands.

Sarah raises her snout toward the first beams of sunlight making their way through the dense canopy of leaves, letting the light wash over her. She rests for a minute in the stillness of the morning, the trees around her silent and yet brimming with life.

She shakes herself once, feeling the breeze through her fur. Her lip peels upward into a freshly lupine smile. She laughs to herself, a husky bark and, canines exposed, tongue lazily feeling the air around her, she breaks into a run.


	2. the beast you’ve made of me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > Like some child possessed, the beast howls in my veins  
> I want to find you tear out all your tenderness

Hundreds of miles away, Rachel Duncan wakes up in a forest, too, though this one is so familiar she barely deigns to open her eyes before she stands. The scene that surrounds her bustles with the movements and noises of a wakening forest as one might imagine in a dream, Disney-perfect. But Rachel has seen this, done this, a hundred times before. She’s impatient; she rolls her eyes at the textbook birdsong announcing the coming sunrise. She’s tired of this song.

She stretches, naked just as Sarah was, only Rachel knows she’s not alone. Soft light illuminates her skin from above, but she feels no warmth. She feels nothing.

Her eyes finally snap open, though only to look down at herself.

She smiles, tracing her fingers lightly along her abdominal muscles. That smile, though ostensibly human while Sarah’s was not, is somehow so much _less_ so.

Rachel looks up suddenly, into the shadows of the surrounding forest as if she’s looking through the very wood of the trees before her. She knows she is not alone; she knows they are watching, as they always are, and the thought makes her smile widen even further.

But there is no smile in Rachel’s eyes. In Rachel’s eyes, there is only steel. In Rachel’s eyes, there is a dare. _Look at me_ , they say into the wood. She flexes each of her muscles in turn, plants her feet in the soil, the feel of which her skin grew numb to long ago, and stands up taller.

In this moment, she is all woman and she knows it. She dares them to look. Dares them to look away.

Her eyes burn into the nothingness before her.

The nothingness stares back.

* * *

“I think that’s _quite_ enough time, Martin, for her to get reacclimated this morning.”

Martin jumps in his seat as a firm hand grasps his shoulder. He tears his eyes from the large glass observation chamber before him and finds a man staring down at him, smiling warmly. The warmth of the man’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes either.

“Yes, sir, Dr. Duncan. I’m sorry, sir. Right away.” The words spill out of the young technician’s mouth as he snaps to attention.

He quickly turns in his chair to face forward again, but this time he is all business, his eyes fixed firmly on the control panel before him. If he is embarrassed, he doesn’t show it, save for the slight reddening of his ears.

Everyone in the observation room feels it, Duncan’s sudden presence. The captain is on deck. He hasn’t been here for this part, not for months—he’d come less and less as Rachel had grown older, grown more bored, more brazen.

The lab techs all double down on their work, eyes trained downward on their own hands scrambling over buttons and touch screens. They’re seated behind control panels on raised platforms encircling a large glass cube, spectators in an ancient Greek theater.

If they have to look up, to look at Rachel, they see not the woman standing naked in a forest—the perfect woman with the sinisterly taunting smile—but test subject Alpha of Project Leto in her glass cage. They see a heartbeat to be measured, brainwaves to be recorded. Not a wolf anymore, but not a woman either.

Ethan sees something else entirely, not the wolf, the woman, or the experiment.

He sees the little girl, his daughter, who awoke years ago in this same observation room, surrounded by the same holographic trees and bathed in the same Early Morning Light™ from the overhead lamps.

The little girl who awoke, frightened and confused, wrists and ankles chafed and bloody where through the night she’d struggled against the shackles that bound them. (They’d dispensed with these crude restraints some time ago, when they developed the latest generation of containment technology. Though early atempts at behavioral adjustments proved futile, new methods of subjugation had stuck—it was all chemical now.)

The Rachel he remembered had burst into tears when she awoke the morning after her first lunar transformation, screaming for her father, screaming for an explanation. (Screaming against the chains, screaming for freedom.)

And that morning, Ethan had run to her immediately, on the verge of tears himself. He’d wrapped his daughter in a blanket, stroking her matted hair and whispering assurances and comforts in her ear. Empty as his words were, that wrenching of his heart that he felt at Rachel’s cries had been real.

Now he sees the little girl still, and yet the creature in the chamber before him is utterly unrecognizable.

The Rachel before him now doesn’t cry. She doesn’t even rage and scream, as she was wont to do for a brief period during her later adolescent years. (It was sometime during that period that Ethan’s presence at her monthly observations had become less regular, perhaps because the novel discoveries and changes in her biology had begun to plateau, perhaps because he simply couldn’t bear to face her violent anger. He could handle the wolf’s bloodlust, but not hers, not when he saw it coming from _her_ face.)

This Rachel Duncan doesn’t make a sound at all, only stares, Ethan feels, right at him through the two-way mirrored glass.

Somewhere along the way during Ethan’s absence, all that rage and defiance had quieted; when he first saw her that morning, he had been relieved at her stillness.

But now, caught in her smirking gaze, Ethan knows that her defiance and violent fury, though silent now, is by no means gone. No, somehow the Rachel before him terrifies him even more than the one who had, in his own words, “displayed unexpectedly elevated levels of aggression in untransformed state post-awakening, and possible signs of psychological instability,” the one who had driven him away, all those years ago.

She had taken her fury and driven it inward. She had harnessed it, consumed it. Devoured it—or had it devoured her?

It crawled under her skin and buried itself deep within her. No blankets or whispered paternal comforts could have stopped it, but now Ethan—who suddenly finds that he has somehow made his way onto the platform directly encircling the cube, face to face with his creation through the glass—wonders if maybe he should have at least tried.

As the scientists around him rush to record their final post-transformation data points for the morning, Ethan stands frozen, inches away from the glass. It takes everything in him to resist the sentimental urge to press his palm up against it, as if he could reach out to her across it, across glass and time and past regrets. As if, if only she knew he was standing before her, and if she pressed her hand up against the other side of the mirror to match his, perhaps he could take her rage and her pain into himself. Perhaps he could free her, he thinks, standing outside the glass cage he built for her.

But all Ethan can do is stand in her presence, both transfixed and terrified at the mere idea of this very different monster than the one he had wanted to create.

* * *

Rachel knows that there is something different this morning.

Nothing is different; everything is the same. Everything she can sense in these thousand cubic feet—sounds, smells, the way the light hits the leaves of that one maple in the northeast corner of her little clearing—everything is exactly as she has come to expect it to be, exactly as it has been the morning after every full moon for years.

And she knows they are there, those scientists in their labcoats, measuring her, watching her every movement… the men leering at her (and some of the women too, because just _look_ at her).

But before she can figure out what exactly it is, a low machine whirr interrupts the manufactured thrum of forest life. Rachel doesn’t move, still entralled by that _something_ in the shadows before her that she can’t quite pinpoint. A small square section of the forest floor opens up, damp moss making way for lace and silk—a robe neatly folded on a metal platform rising up from the floor below.

Without looking down, Rachel grabs the robe and swings it lazily over her shoulders. Once the world around her begins to fade, however, she does finally avert her gaze. As the wild facade is replaced by the soft creature comforts of glass and chrome, Rachel, absent-mindedly smoothing the ends of her already immaculate hair, allows her eyelids to flutter shut for a moment.

When she looks up again, the world has changed its face, but all she sees is the face of the man standing before her—the pale ghost of the man who once upon a time would stand every month waiting for her on that very spot. But whatever might be bubbling in the darkness at the center of Rachel’s eyes, a slight, tight-lipped smile quickly masks it.

As the glass walls of her chamber sink silently into the ground, she makes her way down the steps, not once looking Ethan in the eye.

“It’s been a while, father,” Rachel drawls as she brushes past him. The way she spits the last word, it sounds like _fucker_. “Nice of you to grace us with your presence. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“I- well, I just wanted to see you, Rachel,” Ethan responds lamely.

Rachel ties the robe neatly at the waist, and suddenly her demeanor changes, all business. “If you simply wanted to see me, you should have had Martin put an appointment on the books.” Well, almost all buisness. “I know how long a walk it is to get here from your office upstairs.”

“Well,” Ethan states more assuredly as he follows his daughter up the steps, “there was actually something quite urgent that I thought you shou—“

_Of course there is_ , Rachel blinks, back still to Ethan, and it’s the loudest eyeroll you’ve never seen. “Spare me the theatrics, just tell me what it is. You know I have many other _urgent_ matters to attend to.”

Ethan steps around Rachel to one of the stations—the ones nearest the aisle had gone suddenly vacant as the Duncans walked past. He pulls up several surveillance photos, dated to that same morning.

Rachel gives the photos the barest of glances, moving only her eyes. But before she can sniff and walk away, something catches her, and she finds herself staring openly at the screen.

Ethan taps his fingers on the glass to zoom in. He looks expectantly at his daughter, but all she can do is shake her head slightly, blinking rapidly, unable to comprehend what she’s seeing.

There isn’t really anything all that confusing about the photographs, to be honest. A wolf, dark and strong and oh so _familiar_ to Rachel, illuminated by light that was definitely not cast by the moon—a wolf basking in the full glory of the sun.

“It’s her, Rachel. Sarah Manning. We’ve found her.”

Suddenly, Rachel stops blinking. Her mouth slowly stretches into a gaping, toothy grin. She extends her tongue the slightest bit and licks the air between her lips.

Ethan looks at his daughter, trying to gauge her reaction, but what he finds in her face makes him wish he hadn’t. There is only one way to describe what he sees.

She is hungry.


End file.
